Defence spending and Libya

What's the point of having this superb military if you can't use it?

FAR be it from me to argue that the United States or NATO should be intervening in Libya to stop Muammar Qaddafi from crushing the rebels. But the fact that we're not intervening is pretty telling, if you consider it in historical context. Had a broad-based citizen uprising against Mr Qaddafi broken out in 1999 or 2001, not only would there have been strong American political will for intervention, it would have been easy to put together an international alliance and perhaps even a UN mandate. Those were the years after the Clinton administration, in the aftermath of its embarrassing failures in Bosnia and Rwanda, had decisively embraced the idea of humanitarian intervention. NATO had gone along, and even the UN was pushing towards its eventual ratification of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, which obliged outside powers to intervene militarily when countries failed to protect or actively attacked their own citizens. The Bush administration initially pulled back from the idea of humanitarian interventions, but after the attacks of September 11th it, too, embraced the liberal-internationalist idea of democracy promotion through force. A NATO that endorsed bombing campaigns and eventually military occupation of Kosovo would probably not have shrunk at the far more clear-cut case of Libya, had an uprising happened a dozen years ago.

But NATO is flinching now, and there has been a sea change in the international appetite for humanitarian military interventions. The reason for that sea change is obvious. It is a four-letter word ending in Q. America and her European allies (ah, I love to call America a lady. Got to do that more often) still believe in promoting democracy, obviously, but we no longer believe in doing so at gunpoint, or even in putting our own troops at risk for it when the heavy lifting is being done by a country's own citizens. The fiasco of the Iraq invasion has put us off that sort of thing indefinitely.

Iraq essentially broke the idea of a new world order based on an international community united under common basic precepts of minimally decent government. That breakage may not be permanent; the UN Security Council passed a strong Libya resolution with remarkable alacrity, and the International Criminal Court moved with unprecedented speed to open an investigation of war crimes in Libya. But if there is no "coalition of the willing" for intervention in Libya, that is due to the bitter taste Iraq has left in the mouths of Western governments and voters. The only European state pressing hard for air strikes in Libya is France, which has no bitter memories of foolish support for the invasion of Iraq because France opposed that invasion. Who's a cheese-eating surrender monkey now, eh?

All of which raises a question. Back in the days when the cause of humanitarian intervention was on the rise, during the argument over Bosnia policy, Madeleine Albright (in Colin Powell's telling) encapsulated the thinking in a pithy phrase: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Mr Powell wrote in his memoirs that he "almost had an aneurysm"; the military was not a toy to be used because we had it sitting around. But basically, Ms Albright was right: the United States inherited the world's strongest military because of the cold war, and if in the post-cold war world there were no longer any plausible uses for that military, there really was no point in having it. Mr Powell, in fact, presided over dramatic cuts in the size of the defence establishment. It was the embrace of humanitarian intervention in the cause of promoting democracy, first in Kosovo, then (after the attacks of September 11th) in Afghanistan and finally Iraq, that provided the new justification for a military buildup.

In the aftermath of wasting a couple of trillion dollars and several thousand American lives in Iraq, that justification for having a huge military appears to be dead, too. We have a legacy commitment in Afghanistan, but we are hoping to start winding that down beginning as early as this summer. After Afghanistan, what? If we are not interested in using the American military to stop Muammar Qaddafi from massacring his own people, and to secure oil fields run by Western companies whose precarious status is driving the price of oil over $100 a barrel and threatening to tank the world economy, it is not clear under what possible circumstances we might be interested in using the American military. The question, then, is why we are spending $700 billion a year on it. There is no point in having a superb military if you can't, or won't, use it. And in the long term, we really don't have $700 billion a year to spare for things that serve no purpose. If we're not going to use it anyway, I'd venture we could get along with a military that was, say, half as superb.

When I started reading, I thought this article would be about Libya. Alas, its about domestic policy. You're not going to find much support for cutting the military in half. You have to face health care costs straight on.

If we're going to cut defense spending (and we'll need to, given that totally gutting Medicare and/or Social Security is not going to happen), then we need to do two things:
First, stop buying weapons systems that the Defense Department says are not needed. No matter what Congressman wants to have them built in his district.
Second, sit down and have some serious discussions about what we do want to be able to do with our military. So we can decide what we need to actually accomplish those missions.

Pity the current Congress looks unlikely to even consider doing either. Which likely means that we will eventually get a half-assed job done in crisis mode.

Every President from Reagan, to Bush Sr., to Clinton, to Bush Jr. would have probably bombed the bejezzus out of Lybian airfields by now. Obama is so snakebit by the peaceniks in his own caucus that he is paralyzed by indecision -- he really reminds me of Jimmy Carter, who was always looking over his shoulder at the ghost of Vietnam and the antiwar protests that he let other nations push us around.

rewt66, that's a joke, right? The level of military spending needed to deter foreign invasion of the United States is at most $100 billion a year. The only countries with "bombers" capable of overflying the continental US are Canada and Russia, and the Russian ones are driven by propellers. Oh wait, I think actually a couple of years ago the Russians may have cranked up that one ancient 1970 Mach 2 bomber for a test flight or two, but they usually don't have the money to buy it enough jet fuel.

You don't lay awake at night listening for the sound of foreign bombers for the same reason you don't lay awake at night listening for the hoofs of Cossack steeds or the creak of Viking longboats. That age is gone, and all its giddy joys are now no more, and all its aching splendours, or whatever the Wordsworth line is.

The main justification for the intervention in Afghanistan was to root out Al Qaeda & Taliban, and in Iraq to destroy a (non-existent) nuclear threat. There is little reason to believe that America would have intervened in either country for primarily humanitarian reasons.

That clarified, I agree we should drastically cut back on our military and tell the neo-cons to go suck on it.

Don't you think we should at least wait for the UK government's Chilcot Inquiry report on the Iraq war which is due out soon before we follow Cameron down the garden path?

I can understand why he is so keen to go in there with guns blazing because after all, the British have had their lips glued to Gaddafi's ass for so long that he now farts with a British accent. He is their creation. They can deal with him anyway they want.

Just leave the US out of it. Unless you don't mind following its recommendations.

I don't think the rest of the world has changed. There is no military intervention without the US and there's no political will in America for intervention in Libya, not because of a philosophical change, but because we won't put up with three wars at once. Besides, I'm not so sure Clinton or Bush would've intervened. It's not in our interest to get involved when the outcome looks inevitable.

I did not mean to imply MS is incorrect about Afghanistan & Irag: we could (and did) achieve our initial narrow, professed goals relatively quickly and easily. This is all we needed from our military.

Our military intervention in those countries ENABLED a follow-on quagmire of nation-building and humanitarianism or whatever it is we are doing over there. The $700 billion military was only required for our extended occupations.

In case it escaped your notice, we do in fact have a volunteer military in the US.

OneAegis, M.S., Giraffe142:

My point was not that we needed a military that costs as much as ours does. My point was that "there's no point having it if you won't use it" is a complete misunderstanding of the point of a military. (Unless M.S. meant that tongue in cheek?)

The need for a military should be somewhat proportional to the threat, right? And the threat can be roughly proportional to the amount spent, I'd think. So let's say that not one, but a few countries ganged up on us. We should be able to weather that storm with military spending on par with that which is arrayed against us, maybe a bit more.

So shouldn't we be able to get by with military spending totalling that of the next few countries combined? And perhaps index our military budget to the real world threats that confront us?

Rather than having a budget greater than the next 17 largest militaries combined, perhaps we could get by on, say, the next 5 militaries combined (for surely we would be able to attract at least a few allies if we were invaded?)

It sounds reasonble to me, and would save a few hundreds of billions of dollars per year more than the elimination of, say, public broadcasting and earmarks and the rest of the $61B Republicans currently want to cut...

I love how you forgot the very next sentence. Thank yous are for free volunteers "[a]s in work for free, not as in sign up for something in exchange for money."

Troops deserve no more thank yous than janitors, salesmen or engineers. They signed up for a job. They get paid to do it. You'll note janitors, salesmen and engineers all volunteer to do their job for pay as well.

I think M.S. meant more that a 700 billion dollar a year expenditure is obviously not meant just to keep the bombers at bay. That could be done for small fraction of that price. That amount should at least buy you fighters over Libya. It seems that's not the case though.